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GoboLinux Compile -- A Scalable Portage?
LodeRunner continues "We already have ebuilds, RPM .spec files, and whatnot. The argument for reinventing the wheel yet again was the observation that while developing apps to handle these files is easy, the task of maintaining the ever-growing database of compilation scripts is the real problem -- the huge package collection of Debian comes to mind. Compile took the extreme minimalistic approach, and its scripts ("recipes") are as small as can be: the script for a typical autoconf-based program takes two lines.
Knowledge for handling common situations is usually added to Compile itself instead of being coded in the script (for example, apps that need a separate build directory just add a needs_build_dir=yes line). The plan is to make Compile as smart as it can and the recipes as small as possible.It remains to be seen whether this experiment of gauging differently the tradeoff between flexibility and simplicity will prove itself to be limiting or enlightening, but in the ~six months Compile has been in beta test by the people from the GoboLinux mailing list, over 500 recipes were written, ranging from Glibc and GCC up to KDE and the Linux kernel itself."
When i first changed to gentoo I was gladly surprised by the power and flexability of portage. If this is half as good it is worthy a place in the linux community, no doubt about it!
"Does away with" /usr/bin and /lib?
...In all seriousness, though, that does sound kind of like an interesting concept--might make things easier for people to understand. Me, I like my three letter unpronounceable paths all the same :)
BLASPHEMY!!! They're SINNERS! How DARE they mess with the SACRED directory structure! Et cetera! Et cetera! Ad nauseam!
But is yet another source-based compilation system needed?
Uhmm... I guess not, from now on, we'll do all of our compilations without source code... however that will supposedly be done.
mkdir /System/Settings
ln -s /etc/X11/ /System/Settings/X11
Couldn't this also work?
Yes, an autoconf build script contains two lines. And cannot express version dependencies that the autoconf build didn't think to maintain ... and if it did, it doesn't communicate the dependency back to the build system. It has no way to merge config files. It doesn't even have a way to enumerate the installations. But yes, you could build a system that simple, because it's good enough for some, but even slackware isn't that simple. To say nothing of distribution patches, configuration (e.g. to build xchat with gnome support or not?), and so on.
This isn't to say it'll get to be as complex as portage, but it will probably have to get at least as complex as ports. Which then begs an obvious question...
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Just because you have a Unixish kernel does not mean you have to have a Unixish operating system.
Surprisingly, not everything in the world has to be Unix!
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
It's much more difficult to make a typo in /etc than /System/Config. That's one of the godsends of the POSIX structure over that of Windows - /lib is easier to remember/type than C:\Windows\System32. And there are none of those annoying spaces in /usr/bin that exist in C:\Program Files.
Having created build scripts in FreeBSD, Gentoo, Sourcemage, and Arch Linux, I think the most important goal is to use/develop a script language that newbies find easy to use.
If you're developing a new distro, and you're concerned about giving users a reason to move, focus on making it easy for us to add to the distro!
Check out my blog: My Galaxy is Milky Way Adjacent
Blasphemy my ass. i have been using Linux, BSD, nd other UNIX derivatives for over 10 years now, and all I can say is THANK GOD.
/usr/bin, /etc, /usr/local concept is totally outdated. Having apps in their own directories eases maitenence, eases administration, and eases uninstallation. Think about it, if apps were in their own self contained directories, who even *needs* a package manger? To install, you extract the tar, to uninstall, delete the directory. Boom snap, done and done.
The
Other than core system configuration and core libraries the whole system uses, I ideally think *any app should be totally confined to one directory level. IMO this is one thing Windows does right.
I would tend to agree that breaking the paths would be bad, fourtunately they don't exactly do that.
/Programs/Xorg/6.7.0 and /Programs/KDE/3.2.2. Each file category (executables, libraries, headers) can also be accessed through unified symlink views, such as /System/Links/Libraries and /System/Links/Headers. These views match the legacy directories (/bin, /usr/include, /usr/local/share) and so on, achieving total Unix compatibility while keeping program directories completely self-contained."
What they do is provide a more intuitive (on the surface of it, it seems so to me, need more details to be shure) path system while maintaining compatability to the old system.
"In GoboLinux, each program resides in its own directory, such as
They claim thier systems is path agnostic.
this is a good thing imho. One of my (minor) pet peves is that the standard *nix path system is largely cryptic to joe user, and a pain in the butt even for the cluefull unless you have enough *nix experience to make it automatic.
Now if they fix cut and paste and find a way to make havening both a *nix and a windows version as close as possible to a simple recompile with a few options/flags changed the year of linux as a major desktop contender will finally arive istead of forever being next year.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
The descriptive path thing sounds a lot like what OS X does, except that it goes all the way where OS X still has /usr, /etc, etc. although hidden. I wonder if Apple can patent or has patented that?
Yes, simplicity is good, but only in the context of the whole system. Here, you're just shifting complexity from the per-package scripts to the overall Compile package itself -- creating a large, central, monolithic service.
Because it's centralized, over time, this is going to accumulate a lot crap and become opaque, obfuscated, and unmaintainable. Changes and maintenance to Compile will more significantly impact the contemporary set of recipes than, say, changes to Portage and ebuilds.
It's easy to apply a good idea, like "simplicity", in too narrow of a scope -- to the detrement of the overall design. Better to think about it as balance of "package maintainability", "system maintainability", "barrier of entry", etc.
I've recently switched from linux to OSX, and I've learned that the latter has some clever ideas (e.g. bundles) that can leverage developer effort. Given this context of learning by changing, my own view is that this new direction for linux is worth investigating ... not that I'll likely leave OSX anytime soon.
Yeah, but who the hell starts them with capital letters?!?!?!
Even with tab-completion, I just got my time quadrupled! Frickin' shift keys.
To be fair, this isn't even a new idea for Mac OS X. It came from NeXT.
The filesystem is the package manager
Nice, you just managed to enrage the two biggest groups of Linux zealots in one go. :-)
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Every modern shell supports case-insensitive tab-completion. And in GoboLinux, this is enabled by default.
Try it, you might like it: on bash, just add
set-completion-ignore-case on
on your ~/.inputrc.
The filesystem is the package manager
Anything I compile myself goes in
Believe it or not, most things in unix are they way they are for a reason. That reason may not be immediately obvious to you, but it still exists.
While I'm used to the current paths, I have no hard feelings at all about ditching them.
I don't know if there's a linux standard for what kinds of files go in each directory but everyone I ask has a different answer.
I think switching to an updated naming scheme for directories and getting a common installation/uninstallation routine for applications that actually sticks items on the menus in the guis, etc. would be a huge move forward.
Not that I need either feature. I don't even use a linux gui. But someday maybe I will.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Nonsense. Now emacs and vi: those are teh suck.
=-+
There is plenty.
There are several languages where lowercase -> uppercase -> lowercase can't be done without losing data, for example. Then there is the problem of how many languages you can support. Say, English is easy, but what happens when you find a disk with filenames in an encoding the filesystem doesn't know about?
In Linux, it's just all bytes, it doesn't care if it's english, cyrillic or whatever. With case insensitivity it suddenly has to know what to do with cyrillic letters as well.
And no, OSX is not LSB compliant - go figure. :)
This might be nitpicking, but I think you didn't read what the first letter in 'LSB' stands for - Linux
Yes, I basically agree with you. The Armagetron recipe shows the "ugly" side of recipes: the support for imperative constructs, which often slip in declarative systems (ask any functional programmer...).
:) What we're doing here is just trying a different approach. Time will tell if it produces revolutionary results. :)
In this particular example, I think the recipe author could have avoided the pre_build function using a patch instead. I recommend that very strongly to users, because patches are easier to maintain when writing a new recipe based on a existing one: patches make "rejects" when they change from one version to another, whereas that sed command will fail silently if the recipe writer is not careful. With a patch instead of the function, the Armagetron recipe would be reduced to 3 declarations.
But yeah, there are cases when ugly imperative functions will be impossible to avoid. This most likely means that the design of the project's build system is pretty screwed up.
What I, personally, try to do in those cases is, instead of writing a marvelously smart recipe, is to contribute a patch to the project itself. Most of the times, it's just $prefix-awareness missing, or something like that. Often the effort people spend working around build inflexibilities in distro-specific scripts would be much better spent improving the programs themselves.
It's usually less work to "fix the program" than work around it. For a few key packages for GoboLinux I even contributed the autoconf scripts, and it was way less work than I thought it'd be. The one thing I like about this approach is that it helps the entire free software community, making for smaller recipes, smaller ebuilds, smaller specs, and so on.
Sure, it ain't revolutionary today, but revolutions don't happen from night to day... they are secretly planned for a long time before the strike.
The filesystem is the package manager
It's George!
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand